There’s little less pleasant in life than a dentist drilling into your tooth. A grinding, whirring corkscrew rotating at the speed of several miles per minute bores into the sensitive exposed nubs of your skeleton… and for what? To remove bacteria feeding in your tooth.

It’s not ideal: drilling often times causes more problems than the bacteria it’s aiming to kill. It causes unsightly fillings. It hurts. It’s the dental equivalent of a Civil War saw bones taking a hacksaw to your broken leg: the dental drill was patented in 1875, and feels very definitely like a relic of the era.

Welcome news, then: researchers have announced that they have developed a method of killing tooth bacteria called cold plasma. Instead of using a drill to bore into a tooth and scrape out the bacteria, they just use a twelve to eighteen second burst of this cold plasma which sterilizes the tooth and kills the bacteria without once damaging the tooth.

What’s strange is that researchers don’t seem entirely sure how cold plasma works, or why it destroys the bacteria, but they say that a burst of the stuff completely eliminates the problem in most cases.

What this means is that next time you go to the dentist, you may just get a burst of cold plasma instead of a German dentist stepping on your throat and drilling while quizzing you, “is it safe?” Oh, wait, that’s just in Marathon Man.